Look Closer
by mosylu
Summary: They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, those thousand words are a secret that Cisco never wanted to let out, especially not to Caitlin. Futurefic.


(A/N) Two (2!) people asked me for this prompt on Tumblr ("you lied to me"). Or maybe the same anonymous person twice, ONLY THEY KNOW. Either way, I had to make it special. This is a futurefic.

* * *

"You lied to me."

Cisco didn't look up. "Okay, okay, maybe there was still half a package in the back of the freezer, but seriously, Cait, cookie time is over and my regular dealer quit Scouts to join cheerleading. I gotta ration myself until next year. Stay back." He flipped his mask down, checked that she'd covered her eyes and turned her back, and squeezed the trigger of his favorite welding torch.

She waited until he'd finished to say, "Wait, what? There are still Girl Scout cookies?"

"Uh. No. Of course not. Ha, ha."

"Hmmm."

Cisco sighed, knowing his Thin Mints were as good as gone. At least he hadn't told her about the Shortbreads in a ziploc bag in his desk. Maybe not the most popular cookie out there but she was the one who'd first brought in a jar of Nutella and told him to dip them. So really that particular addiction was her fault.

"No, I was talking about something else we need to discuss."

"Oh, jeez. Okay, look, yes, I printed out that intern request from the university, but if you'd looked you'd've seen I didn't fill any of it out yet. I just want to have it when I finally convince you that we need another pair of hands around here if we both don't want to drop dead of overwork in the next year."

"We have no funding. We can't afford to pay anybody," she said in an exasperated voice. "And that's not what we need to talk about either."

"If it means I might see my apartment by daylight, I'll scrape up some loose change. And if we had somebody to help out, we could maybe focus actual time on _getting_ funding."

She glared, and he held up his hands in surrender. They'd had approximately fifty-seven thousand go-rounds of staff vs funding, the chicken or the egg, and he was okay with letting it drop for tonight. "So it's not cookies and it's not our woefully overstretched selves, what is it?"

She crossed her arms. Uncrossed them. Bit her lip. "Did you check your email?"

He blinked. "Not in the past few hours," he said. "And really, don't you think you email me an awful lot for someone who's worked one desk away for the past five years?"

"Not from me. From Barry."

"Barry?"

The Flash was on his honeymoon. Wally West was keeping a lid on things in Central City, with Vibe and Killer Frost pitching in when needed and a few other heroes on standby. Cisco couldn't imagine a single reason why their friend might email him.

"Well, not exactly from Barry. Well, I mean, sort of."

"Caitlin Snow, I'm getting more and more confused and that's not a good situation to be in when I'm working with an arc welder."

She crossed her arms again. "So shut it off and come check your email."

She glanced at the glowing welds, and he said, "Don't you bork my welds by pulling all the heat out of them. They have to cool slowly. Didn't you get enough off the torch?"

She rolled her eyes and turned on her heel. "I'll be waiting in the lab."

He finished the last weld and then put his equipment away, trying to figure out what she was talking about if she wasn't annoyed about his cookie hoarding or his sneaky attempt to save them both from burning out.

He fished his phone out of his pocket and checked his email while he walked, but when he got to the lab, he wasn't any closer to working it out. She was waiting, arms crossed. He shot her a puzzled look. "I checked. What the heck are you talking about?"

They were alone. With Barry out of town, Wally in class, and no metahumans with late appointments to check their suits or medications, the lab was quiet and dark. He was actually surprised she was still here. He'd only stayed because he wanted to finish the repairs on the machine.

"It came in about an hour ago," she said. Instead of hovering over his shoulder, she sat across from him, eyes fixed on his face. "From the photographer?"

He frowned at his phone. "Wait, the pictures from the wedding?"

"Go look at them. On a bigger screen," she commanded. "You can't see anything on that phone."

He switched to his tablet and tapped the link to the photographer's webpage. He dutifully entered the code provided and accessed the pictures.

"I'm still not sure what this has to do with lying to you," he said, scrolling through.

"Which set are you looking at?"

"The ceremony." Which. Awwww. He smiled mistily at Barry and Iris, exchanging vows and rings and kisses. "Wow, these are really nice. That guy did good work."

Caitlin made an impatient noise. "Forward. The reception." She came around the desk and leaned over his shoulder. "There. That! That one."

He tapped, and felt his stomach drop.

Caitlin had been giving her maid-of-honor speech, and had gotten one laugh in the whole thing. But it had been a good one, people had _roared_ , and the photographer had captured the pride and glee that shone from her face because Caitlin didn't often get that kind of reaction to her jokes.

The shot had also caught Cisco, grinning up at her. And there, on his face, was everything he felt, everything he tried to hide or suppress or not think about. Everything he pretended didn't exist, working side-by-side with her for years.

The real Caitlin, hovering at his elbow, said, "Well?"

He swallowed and managed to smile at her. "That was a great party, wasn't it? I drank a lot. Like, a lot. Look at all those dead soldiers."

"Oh, yes, there must be a whole two beer bottles on the table."

"Plus champagne."

"I'm not talking about alcohol consumption, Cisco, I'm talking about - " She reached over his arm and tapped another picture.

They were dancing in this one, some kind of slow dance. He couldn't be sure which song it was or anything because they'd danced half the night.

One of his hands held hers against his heart. The other rested in the small of her back, exposed by the low cut of the dress. He remembered stroking slow circles into her soft, soft skin with his thumb and breathing in the smell of her hair. He honestly looked like a man who could spend the whole rest of eternity just like he was, with the woman in his arms.

His heartbeat thudded in his ears. He scrambled. Deflect, deflect, deflect. "Damn, we're a good-looking pair, aren't we? You're gorgeous, and I'm rocking that tux."

"You thought I was gorgeous?"

"Yes," he said. "Which you knew, because I told you that before the ceremony."

Ha. Gorgeous wasn't even saying it. He'd about fallen out of his shiny shoes when she'd powered through the groom's room, bent on making sure the rings were right where they were supposed to be. Caitlin had taken the maid of honor's organizational duties very seriously.

Cisco had taken the best man's duties very seriously too, and it was really only Barry's hyper-metabolism that kept him from saying his vows with the mother of all hangovers.

But Cisco had forgotten his own hangover when she'd walked in, a woman on a mission in a blue sheath dress, tiny diamonds sparkling like chips of ice at her ears and her throat, and her heat-colored hair spilling over her shoulders and down her back. He may have forgotten his own name.

He had definitely - he could admit it now - forgotten the resolution of years' standing, not to let his feelings show. These pictures betrayed him.

She propped her hip on the edge of his desk and fixed him with a steely gaze. "You said we'd go together as just friends."

"We did."

"Not if you look at that picture. Doesn't it look - I mean. Just a little."

"What?"

"Romantic."

Shit. _Shit._

"Okay. Maybe a little." He grinned at her. "I'm a sappy drunk, you know that."

"This is beyond sappy."

It was, oh, it was. But Cisco hadn't protected his heart all these years by folding at the first challenge. "C'mon, Cait. A summer wedding, a gorgeous woman in a gorgeous dress, those little lantern things hanging off the trees, do you blame me for getting carried away? Just for one night?"

She took a breath, then another. "Carried away. Is that what you call - that?" She jabbed a finger at them on the screen, all wrapped up in each other. At his photographed face, with all the barriers down.

He closed the tablet and tossed it on his desk. "Caitlin. We've been friends for years. Why would I want to mess that up?"

She held his gaze. Something was fading out of her eyes, something he couldn't even name. When it was gone, she looked away. "No. You're right. Not for - you wouldn't."

"Right," he said, his heart strangely heavy.

"Well. Okay." She got to her feet and started fussing with her workstation, shoving things into drawers with her head turned away. "All right then. I just had to clear that up. I'm going."

"Whoa, hey, it's after dark. Wait five minutes, I'll walk out with you."

She extracted her purse from a drawer and shrugged into her coat. "Cisco, I'm a reformed supervillain. I can induce hypothermia in under five seconds, up to a distance of forty feet. I think I can handle a mugger."

"Yeah, I know. I need you to protect me."

It made her laugh, which was what he'd been hoping for. That was their relationship. She was snarky, he made her laugh, and both of them let it go unsaid just how easily and readily they'd lay down their lives for one another.

But as they walked out, she was quiet and withdrawn, not responding even to the almost-frantic chatter that flowed out of him. He felt all off-balance. Was she angry? Why? Had he convinced her? Oh, god. If he hadn't convinced her, things were going to be weird. Scratch that. Things were going to be awful.

He was in love with her, yeah, but being her friend was just as important.

At her car, he caught her arm. "Hey."

"What?"

"We - we're okay, right?"

She smiled brightly. "Sure. We're okay. Why wouldn't we be?"

He let her go. "No reason."

"Night."

"Night."

They'd parked next to each other out of habit. Also out of habit, she waved at him out the window at the light where he took a left and she kept going straight. He waved back.

Halfway home, he pulled into a grocery store parking lot and turned off his car. In the quiet and the dark, he turned on his tablet and downloaded the pictures, swiping through them. Torturing himself.

His own emotions were all over them. The photographer seemed to have caught every time he was giving her a look that had his heart in his eyes.

Or maybe it was just that he'd been looking at her like that all night. He hadn't been kidding. He really did get kind of sappy when he drank.

He pored over the pictures for what must have been an hour. About halfway through that, he stopped looking at his own face and started looking at Caitlin's.

He went all the way to the end, then started back at the beginning, and went through to the end again. Then a third time.

He said softly, "Holy shit."

* * *

When she opened the door, she was already in her pajamas, her face scrubbed clean and her hair loose. "Cisco? What is it?"

"Hey," he said. "Can I come in?"

"Sure, of course." She closed the door behind him.

She looked like she was all settled in for the night. One of the paper files from the lab sat open on her coffee table, with the graph paper they both used to make notes and thoughts. There was a mug next to the file.

Neither was an unexpected sight. They both took work home all the time, and she drank hot tea by the gallon, to regulate the low-level heat cravings that her spinal implants didn't quite mitigate.

He looked closer.

It wasn't tea; it was hot chocolate. She hadn't been able to eat ice cream in years, and hot chocolate was now her comfort food of choice.

The pajamas were her thickest, softest ones, which she only wore when she felt sick or her powers were lashing out, and since she always noted it in her file when she was having a cold flare, he knew that wasn't it.

Her tablet sat half under the file with something flickering on the screen. He caught a glimpse of Alexis Bledel and was pretty sure it was "Gilmore Girls" - her guilty pleasure, loudly disavowed, watched in secret when she'd had a bad day.

And after looking at all those pictures, it seemed like she'd had a bad day, or at least a really bad half hour at the end of the day.

She said, "Cisco. What is it?"

He looked back at her. "I wasn't lying. I really did go with you as friends."

She shook her head, baffled. "I - we cleared that up."

She turned and headed toward her kitchen, knowing without asking that he wanted a cup of hot chocolate, because she got the fancy kind with little pieces of real chocolate in it and other crazy stuff like peppermint or salted caramel and hot damn, did he love it.

But for once, he wasn't thinking about hot chocolate. He was focused on what he'd come to say.

"I am your friend. I mean, you're my friend. You're just about the closest friend I've ever had."

"Cisco, I know." She got down a mug and filled it with water from the tap, then poured that into her kettle and plugged it in. "Look, I saw something that wasn't there and I jumped to a conclusion, and can we just forget about it?"

He almost took the out. Almost. But he remembered what he'd seen, and swallowed, and scraped his courage together. "Well, no, I can't, because I looked at the other pictures."

"What other pictures?"

He opened his tablet and held it out to her. She took it and looked down at the screen.

He knew what she saw - them, at the end of the ceremony, about to follow Barry and Iris back up the aisle. She'd been sniffling, her smile watery.

The photographer had caught her looking at him while he fished around in his pocket for a handkerchief. Her wet eyes were soft and warm.

The present-day Caitlin bit her lip, and her eyes looked vulnerable.

"How about this one?" He swiped a few more times.

It was the same dance as before, the slow dance, but this shot showed Cisco's back and Caitlin's face. Her eyes were open and dreamy. Perfectly content.

She sucked in her breath and pushed the tablet back at him.

"Cait," he said quietly. "Am I seeing things? Is this just - you know. The music and the night and the little lanterns in the trees?"

She shook her head, a quick jerky motion.

He wanted to say something, but hope rose up in his throat and choked him.

She turned her face away, staring fixedly at the electric kettle. "It - it wasn't just that night. It isn't. It's been - awhile."

He put the tablet down. "I'm sorry."

She put her hand over her face.

He caught her wrist and pulled it down. "I'm sorry I'm a chickenshit. I'm sorry I made you feel like you were imagining things. I'm sorry I've been lying to myself for so long that denying what I feel just comes automatically."

"What you - " She looked at him, and her eyes were wet and wary. "What do you feel?"

He gestured at the tablet. "It's all right there. You saw it."

"You said it was the wine. And the dress. And the - " she gestured vaguely with her free hand. "The little lanterns in the trees."

"Yeah," he said. "It was also you. It's always you."

"Always," she said.

Heart in his throat, he nodded.

She touched his face, and leaned in. He met her halfway. Their lips brushed, just barely. They watched each other, testing, questioning.

 _Yes?_

 _This?_

They pulled away. Still watching each other. He saw the answer in her slow-blooming smile.

 _Yes._

 _This._

He let his eyes close - she wasn't going anywhere - and kissed her again, harder. She pulled him close, hands fisted in his t-shirt, and said, "Cisco," into his mouth.

There was no wine, no dress, no tux, no little lanterns in the trees. (No trees.) He was wearing a Pac-Man t-shirt and cords. She was in her pajamas and bare feet. They stood in her kitchen under a fluorescent light, and on the counter next to them, the electric kettle rattled as it came to a boil.

He whispered, "Caitlin," back. This was _them_ , it was real, it was happening.

* * *

She sent him home very early the next morning, because "we should get _some_ sleep and that's clearly not going to happen if you're here the rest of the night."

"We've got better things to do than sleep," he'd said, pulling her close, their legs tangling together. She'd laughed, and then she'd made little "mmmm" sounds and it was another half an hour before he got out of her bed.

He got about two hours of sleep before his alarm went off, but for the way he felt, it might as well have been a whole lazy weekend.

He had a bad moment in the shower. What if this was all from some other timeline? One of the blips that didn't fit his reality?

What if, when he went into work, Caitlin just smiled at him absently and the love bite he'd left above her collarbone wasn't there? What if this was all supposed to happen to some other Cisco?

He got out of the shower and stood in his bathroom, shampoo dripping on his shoulders and down his back. He counted the pills he took to keep the other dimensions from slamming into his cerebral cortex whenever they liked. Nope. He was up to date.

He dropped the pill organizer back onto his counter, letting out his breath. Okay. Okay. This was here and now, and this belonged to him.

Just to prove it, there was a picture text from her waiting on his phone.

It was from the photographer's website. It was among the last pictures in the set, taken while Barry and Iris were climbing into the limo that would take them away. Caitlin had leaned in to say something to him, and he'd tipped his head toward her. Though the photo couldn't possibly show it, he'd also lightly pushed out a bubble of quiet, using inverse waves, an automatic reaction when he needed to hear better. In the middle of the clapping, laughing party-goers, they looked like they were in their own little world.

Correction. This belonged to _them._

He smiled at the picture and set it as his lock screen.

* * *

Since Star Labs was only about three miles off-campus, Wally West had fallen into the habit of dropping by between classes, just to see if there was anything interesting going on. When he zipped in that morning between his office hours and the hellish 101 class he TA'd, it was to see Caitlin and Cisco hunched over paperwork together.

"They need proof of our 501(c)(3) status. Do we have that? Where is that?"

"In the drawer labeled corporation paperwork. Do we want a new one each semester? Or should we ask for a year commitment?"

"It's probably too late to get anybody for the fall semester, they're all sewn up. Ask for spring, and if they're awesome we'll talk them into staying over the summer."

"We need to work up some confidentiality paperwork for them to sign," Caitlin fretted, jotting down a note. "Is Dante still dating that law librarian, do you know?"

"Whoa, okay, cart before the horse much? C'mon, let's focus on getting the intern first and then decide about things like confidentiality."

"Intern?" Wally said brightly, grabbing a donut out of the pink box by Cisco's computer. "You guys are getting an intern?"

They looked up. They hadn't even noticed him come in. Wow, that must be some heavy-duty paperwork. "We're applying for one through the university," Caitlin said. "Who knows how soon we'll actually get one."

He perched on the desk, swinging his legs. "Really?" he said through a mouthful of Boston creme. "What changed your mind?"

She shrugged. "Well. I mean, we're still going to look for funding. We do need that. But Cisco's convinced me that it might be nice to have - " She shot Cisco a sideways glance. "Time for a personal life."

Cisco grinned at her.

Wally paused, mid-chew. Then he bolted from the room and ran three laps around Star Labs, yelping, _"Oh my Jesus finally!_ " into the wind before zipping back in.

Caitlin brushed her windblown hair out of her face and frowned at him. "What was that?"

"Nothing," he said, grinning, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Just needed to work off a little case of the fidgets."

"Uh-huh," she said slowly, picking up the papers that had blown every which way.

"Soooo," he said. "When did this happen?" He waggled his brows.

"Changing my mind? Does it really matter?"

"Last night," Cisco said.

Wally punched the air. His new cousin-in-law owed him twenty bucks now.

Caitlin shot Cisco a look.

He laughed, and took her hand. "C'mon, Cait, we decided we weren't going to be all stupid-sitcom about this." He nodded at Wally. "Like he wouldn't have figured it out anyway."

"Yeah, I probably would have noticed when you guys snuck off to have sex in the wiring closet."

"I would _never_ ," Caitlin said.

They both looked at her.

"Not the _wiring closet_ , really, Wally." She pointed at Cisco. "He would notice something out of place and we'd never get anywhere."

Cisco said, "Hey."

Her mouth curled up at the edges, a flirty expression that Wally had never seen on her face before. "Are you denying it?"

"Well - it would be a pretty close competition."

They smiled goofily at each other, and Wally snagged the internship paperwork and started filling in what he could. Hopefully, whoever they got would be hot as well as smart. Barry and Iris, Cisco and Caitlin … it _had_ to be his turn next.

FINIS


End file.
